Blue City (16 page)

“What’s this, Garland?” he said when he saw me.

“Boy friend here came along and hurt Rusty, so I put him to work. I told him to dig it deep enough for two, didn’t I, boy friend?”

“You’re very audacious,” Kerch said to me. “Your audacity will be the death of you.”

“Electricity will be the death of you. I think you’ll all die in a chair before long.”

“Keep him digging,” Kerch said to Garland. “Don’t shoot him unless you have to. I may have another use for him.”

“Where’s the injured lady?” Salamander said in his rich voice.

“In the kitchen.”

They went in and closed the door.

I went on digging in a slowing rhythm. I was very tired. The blood beat painfully in my sore head. Some of the blisters had broken, leaving my hands raw. The hole was up to my chin when I straightened up.

“That should be deep enough,” Garland said. “It’s probably only temporary anyway.”

“Do I climb out now, or do I just stay here?”

“You can come in and get Sault and fill it up.”

I was so tired that I didn’t realize for a minute what that meant. It meant that I wasn’t going to share the grave with Sault.

In the kitchen, the ex-doctor was working over Floraine Weather’s ex-face. I looked once, and looked away. Kerch’s vanity had been thoroughly avenged. The only human thing left about the woman was the little bubbling sound her breath still made.

“I can’t save her,” Salamander said. “She’s lost too much blood.”

“She has to be kept alive,” Kerch said from where he sat at the window. “If you don’t save her, you’ll do no more
abortions in this town. I could have you put away for the rest of your life, Professor.”

The old man looked at Kerch with panic in his little, yellow eyes. “I tell you I can’t save her. The only thing that would save her is a transfusion. She’s in profound shock.”

“Then give her a transfusion.” Kerch glanced at me. “Here’s a healthy young source of blood for you.”

“I can’t! I haven’t got the instruments. I don’t know what her blood type is. If you want to save her, you’ve got to take her to a hospital. Even then, it’s probably too late.”

“No, we can’t do that,” Kerch said slowly. “How long will it take her to die?”

“She might live for a couple of hours. I can’t give you an accurate estimate. She’s not losing any more blood.”

“Take out the stitches, then. If she has to die, she had better die quickly. I can’t wait a couple of hours.”

Salamander looked at him in horror. “Take out the stitches?”

“That is what I said. Then you can attend to Rusty. What do you want, Garland?”

“The hole’s about five feet deep. Is that deep enough?”

“I think so,” Kerch said. “We’ll make other arrangements later, when we’re not so pressed for time.”

“Pick him up, fellow,” Garland said to me. “Pick him up and bring him along.”

Death had not yet stiffened Sault’s body, but he wasn’t convenient to carry. Perhaps it was simply that I had never buried a man before, and it made me weak. I carried him gently, but the final drop into the earth jarred a gasp of air
out of his lungs. I covered his body with earth before I covered his upturned face. It was hard to throw the spadeful that hid his dead face from the sky.

Garland recited a derisive singsong:

“I thought he was a friend of yours.”

“Nobody is a friend of mine,” he said seriously. “What do you think I am, a softie?”

Before I had finished filling the grave, Kerch opened the door and called to Garland: “Bring him in here.”

“Quick march,” Garland said.

They had wrapped the woman in a car rug, head and all. Kerch ordered me to carry her out and put her in the back seat of the car. I did this. Already I was getting the mortuary feeling that dead bodies weren’t human any more, merely clumsy bundles to be disposed of. The woman wouldn’t have been comfortable with her head in the corner of the seat and her swathed legs twisted sideways onto the floor, but her comfort no longer mattered.

When Garland and I returned to the kitchen, Kerch ripped a button from my coat and a few hairs from my head. Garland’s gun in the small of my back kept me from taking hold of him.

“Now let me see,” Kerch said. “It would be nice if he carried a knife.”

Garland dipped his free hand in my pocket and brought out the spring knife. “But this is Sault’s,” he said.

“All the better,” Kerch said. “The more confusion, the better.”

He dropped the knife in his pocket and put my button and hair in an envelope. “You stay here, Garland, and take care of Weather. The Professor says that Rusty will come around if we just leave him. I should be back in two or three hours. If anyone interferes with you in the meantime, I’ll probably be at Alonzo Sanford’s house.”

“Can I shoot him if he acts too wise?” Garland said.

“It would be more convenient if you didn’t, not just now. But use your own judgment. Come along, Professor.”

The little man scampered after him like a frightened lizard. Their motor roared, receded, and faded out in the distance. I had given up hope on Allister, who had either failed to get my message or disregarded it, but a new hope formed in my tired muscles and rose to my head. Garland was a terrifying shot, but otherwise he wasn’t much of a man, and he was the only one I had to deal with. If I could get close enough to touch him before Kerch returned, before Rusty came to, before his bullet could find me. I closed my eyes so he couldn’t see them, and sat thinking in the dark.

“Be very careful,” he said, as if he could read my mind. “I’ve got this gun on you all the time.”

I didn’t open my eyes or answer him. After a while I heard the click of his lighter and the tiny crackling of a cigarette taking fire, and a few minutes later the light plop of the butt on the floor and the grinding of his heel as he put
it out. The gasoline lamp hissed constantly like a simmering kettle on the stove.

Much later, I heard the scrape of his chair as he got up. My head was tilted back, and I scarcely had to raise my eyelids to see him. He was walking sideways towards the sink, watching me from the corners of his eyes. Shifting the gun to his left hand, he turned on the tap, rinsed a clouded tumbler which he took from a shelf above the sink, and filled it with water. When the lower rim of the tilted glass was in his mouth and the upper rim was approaching the bridge of his nose, I moved.

He fired twice before I reached him, but the bullets went over my crouched back. Then my shoulder caught him in the belly and bore him backwards against the sink. My right hand found the gun and took it away from him. I clenched my fingers in his fair, waved hair and beat his head against the edge of the sink until he no longer struggled. Then I took each of his slender wrists in turn, and snapped it across my knee. I was getting pretty tired of Garland.

The Packard was waiting where I left it, with the engine still running. The tank was less than half full, but that was more than enough to take me where I wanted to go. I drove back to the concrete highway but left it at the first turning, in order to avoid my inquisitive friend at the gas station, and entered the city by another road. It was too early for the residents of the north side to be going to work, but even there I saw signs that the city was waking up. There were lights in many of the houses and some traffic on the streets. I passed a garbage truck and a milk truck, a man in overalls rolling a lawn-mower along the sidewalk, a few colored girls coming up from the black ghetto on the other side of Lillian Street to wash the glasses from last night’s parties and give their white mistresses breakfast in bed.

Before I reached Sanford’s house, a cruising police car came up behind me and slid slowly by. I had an impulse to stop my car and duck down in the seat, but the patrol car went on and paid no attention to me. The sudden pounding of my heart and my white-knuckled grip on the wheel told me what a chance I was taking, but I had no alternative—unless I wanted to leave town and drop the case just
when it seemed to be breaking. I didn’t want to do that. No, I did want to do it, but I couldn’t.

I circled the block in which Sanford’s house stood alone. I couldn’t see any trace of Kerch’s black car, but there were lights on in the house, upstairs and down. I parked in the side street by the tennis courts, and walked up the back driveway to the service entrance at the rear of the house.

The Negro maid who had let me in the night before was washing dishes at an open window beside the door. Her profile was to me, and I could see her lips moving as she talked steadily to herself:

“Keep me up till all hours and then get me up in the middle of the night to make breakfast six o’clock in the morning. Who they think I am, the mechanical girl they showed down in the window of the five-and-ten? Fetch and carry, bring me a drink, just bring me the
yolks
of three eggs. I can’t eat the white, what’s the matter with you, girl, this toast is like it’s made out of old leather? Yes, Mr. Sanford, no Mr. Sanford—Mr. Sanford, kiss my rump.”

She threw down a final spoon with a clatter, and dumped the dishpan in the sink. Throwing back her head in a buoyant gesture, which contrasted with her growling voice, she began to sing the opening bars of
I Wanna Get Married
. Her eyes roved around and saw me at the door, and she stopped in the middle of the line. I knocked tactfully as if I had just arrived, and she opened the door, talking:

“Ain’t nothing for you to do today, and the cook got orders from Mr. Sanford not to feed anybody at all at the door. Wait a minute, though, if you want to wait around for
a while until Sim gets up, he might let you polish one of the cars, he was saying yesterday the Lincoln needed washing, if you want to wait.”

“I’m not looking for work.” I took a dollar out of my wallet and wrapped the end of it around my forefinger.

“Say, ain’t you the man that was here last night? What you doing, coming to the back door? You want to see Mr. Sanford again?”

“Is he up?”

“Yeah, but I don’t think he wants to see anybody this early in the morning. Wait a minute, I’ll go and see. You can come in here if you don’t want to go around to the front. Say, your clothes is a mess. What’s the matter with you, mister?”

She opened the door and I slipped her the dollar. “I was in an accident.”

“You wait here. I’ll go and ask—”

“No, don’t disturb Mr. Sanford. I’m looking for a man called Kerch. Do you know him?”

“I ought to. He had breakfast with Mr. Sanford this morning.” She relapsed into her singsong monologue: “Get up at six o’clock and make breakfast for two people because the cook isn’t here yet. I wasn’t hired for a cook.”

“Listen to me. Is Kerch still here?”

“No, he left. Four fried eggs I had to give him. Six slices of toast he ate. Juice of five oranges. And he didn’t even have the manners to leave me anything.” She caught herself up and looked at me a little nervously. “Mr. Kerch a friend of yours?”

“Has Mr. Kerch got any friends?”

She allowed her lips to stretch in a large, warm smile. “Not likely. Mr. Sanford is a friend of his, though, I guess.”

“If you served them breakfast, you probably heard what they were talking about.”

Her dark face stiffened and she gave me a narrow look. “I never talk about anything that goes on in the front of the house. Mr. Sanford’s strict with us about that, and don’t you forget he could fix me so I’d never get another job in this town.”

I took a ten out of my wallet, folded it carefully, and tucked it in the frilled pocket of her apron. She made a token gesture of repelling the contamination, but she let the bill stay in the pocket.

“I’m not asking you to give away any secrets,” I said. “I think I know what they were talking about. All I want is confirmation.”

She smiled again. “You give me ten dollars so you can tell me what Mr. Sanford was talking about at breakfast?”

“I’ll tell you, then you tell me whether I’m right.”

“All right, mister. I’m listening.”

“They were talking about the property of a woman called Mrs. Weather.”

“They didn’t say nothing about no Mrs. Weather—”

“Floraine, then. Did they mention Floraine?”

“Go on, mister. I’m still listening.”

“Kerch was in a hurry to sell Floraine’s property to Mr. Sanford. Am I warm?”

“You’re hot, mister. You’re burning up. How you know all this?”

“I’m a good guesser. But there’s one thing I can’t guess. Was Mr. Sanford willing to buy? Did the deal go through?”

“I don’t know,” the maid said. “Mr. Sanford told me to take the trays out and not come back. But I don’t think he wanted to do it. He had that frozen-face look,
you
know.”

“Yeah,” I said. “I’ve seen it. Where’s Mr. Sanford now?”

“He’s still up in his room, I guess. He reads all the time in the morning before he goes over to the office. I never saw a man read so much.”

“Go and ask him if he’ll see me, will you?”

“Yes, sir. I’ll ask him.” But she lingered in the kitchen and finally said: “You won’t tell him I was talking to you about Mr. Kerch? That’d be my job for sure.”

“I won’t tell him,” I promised. “I appreciate your help.”

“I appreciate your eleven bucks.” She flashed me another smile. “Maybe you better come in the front hall and wait. The cook’ll be here any time and she don’t like people in the kitchen.”

I waited in the hall while she danced up the baronial staircase and a minute later danced down:

“Mr. Sanford says you can come right up. It’s the door that’s open at the top of the stairs.”

He was sitting by a tall window in a leather armchair, which emphasized by its amplitude the thinness of his shrunken body. His silk robe fostered the illusion, supported by his changeless pallor and the unsleeping vigilance of his cold eyes, that he had been up all night. But the wide, Elizabethan bed in the alcove behind him was unmade.

He turned his book over on his knee—it was the Everyman’s
edition of
Progress and Poverty
—and looked up at me: “You’ll excuse my not getting up.”